How To Create a New Sudo-enabled User on Rocky Linux 8 [Quickstart]

SSH in to your server as the root user:

ssh root@your_server_ip_address

Use your server’s IP address or hostname in place of your_server_ip_address above.

Use the adduser command to add a new user to your system:

adduser sammy

Be sure to replace sammy with the username you’d like to create.

Use the passwd command to update the new user’s password:

passwd sammy

Remember to replace sammy with the user that you just created. You will be prompted twice for a new password:

Output
Changing password for user sammy.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

Use the usermod command to add the user to the wheel group:

usermod -aG wheel sammy

Once again, be sure to replace sammy with the username you’d like to give sudo privileges to. By default, on Rocky Linux, all members of the wheel group have full sudo access.

To test that the new sudo permissions are working, first use the su command to switch from the root user to the new user account:

su - sammy

As the new user, verify that you can use sudo by prepending sudo to the command that you want to run with superuser privileges:

sudo command_to_run

For example, you can list the contents of the /root directory, which is normally only accessible to the root user:

sudo ls -la /root

The first time you use sudo in a session, you will be prompted for the password of that user’s account. Enter the password to proceed:

Output
[sudo] password for sammy:

If your user is in the proper group and you entered the password correctly, the command that you used with sudo will run with root privileges.

In this quickstart tutorial you created a new user account and added it to the wheel group to enable sudo access. For more detailed information on setting up a Rocky Linux 8 server, please read our Initial Server Setup with Rocky Linux 8 tutorial.